


Obsession

by dovingbird



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Phantom of the Opera (2004), Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: Angst, F/M, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-25
Updated: 2014-01-25
Packaged: 2018-01-09 22:36:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1151625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dovingbird/pseuds/dovingbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s only a matter of time before he loses patience with her. She counts the days until her inevitable death at his hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Obsession

The scars are not just on his face. She knows that many people think they are, that it's all they saw that night, but they're wrong. The scarring is so widespread, so thick in some places and thin in others, that finding an untouched piece of flesh is the rarity. There are times when she touches him that he grows angry, frustrated, at the fact that he can't even feel her fingertips, so deeply have the nerve endings been burned out. That he wouldn't know she was touching him if he wasn't looking right at her hands.  
  
Those are the rough nights, and she comes out of each with a scar of her own, whether it be a surface bruise or a slice in her heart from his words.  
  
She doesn't know what to do anymore. It used to be that just the thought of their union was enough to calm him, that the sight of her breasts as she bared them brought such a flush to his skin that he began to sweat. But now he wants more, and she's not even sure what that is.  
  
It's not enough that she gave up everything for him. A title. A husband. A newborn child. It's not enough that she left the finest splendor she's ever known and descended with him into Hell, where she can make the flames, the crucible, more manageable. More tolerable.  
  
He wants her to make him normal, she decides. He doesn't understand why she can't, just as she can't leave his side again out of the sheer infantile hope that he will lose that little twitchy gleam of insanity in his eyes, because the day it occurs he would be Raoul's equal - nae, his _superior_ \- and it would make this hold he has on her actually make sense. He wants her to take her magic voice and transfer it, to make magic hands instead, so that every pattern she draws on his skin will make his flesh clean and new like a baby's.  
  
He's never known what that feels like, though. What little she's picked up from his nightmare whispers, his stares when she speaks, and the things that he actively volunteers for her to hear, it's all told her that he came out of his mother exactly how he is. That even as he grew, even as new skin should have stretched across his body, the scarring persisted.  
  
She remembers him telling her about the first time he became aware of a tickle on his arm. It was a cobweb that he stepped through in the sewers, one that he didn't even realize had been there until he felt a faint sensation right there, right on his forearm. And it confused him. Frightened him half to death. It was so overwhelming for him to feel that he...  
  
He cut off there. But he carefully stroked the ugly scarring on his forearm as he stared at the ceiling, and she was able to draw her own conclusions.  
  
How long, she wonders? How much longer will he tolerate her normalcy, her lack of splendor, before he realizes that she's never going to become the magical creation that he wants her to be? That he saw her as however many years ago?  
  
How long until they are joined as one and he sees the truth there, beneath him, right before his eyes, and reaches out his hands to snuff it out as punishment for how she lied to him, just as he lied to her? To crush her vocal folds until she'll never sing again? And then to cave in her throat until she won't breathe either?  
  
How long? How long until he sends her to the real Hell? And then how long before he joins her by his own hand?


End file.
